The Splintered Eye (The War of Memory Cycle) (87 page)

He did not flinch.  Far worse things had been pointed at him in his life, and no blade could frighten him, not with the rage a shivering flame in his chest.  Not with the cords of power collecting beneath his skin, running through his nerves, waiting impatiently for release.

Another step, the silver blade a hair's width from his neck.  The Muriae man’s vulnerable substance still too far to reach, even from a sudden lunge.  Two more steps.  He could hold himself together for two more steps...

"She has to be destroyed, you know.  Your ‘daughter’," said Orrith in a low, conspiratorial voice.  "You should not have tampered with the stuff of life."

Kill him.

This time he did not resist.  He did not want to.  He flung himself at Orrith only to hit the stairs a moment later, face aching from the hilt of the silver sword, the man’s laughter ringing in his ears.  Power spilled from his hands to spider-crawl across the steps as he tried to push up, but then his breath was gone, his side burning as Orrith's plated boot took him in the ribs.  From below he heard his wife shout in anger, heard the wolfish huntsmen—his friends and cohorts—snarl in response.

The Trifolders drew their weapons.

All turned to chaos.  Him against the blurry sword, the silver armor that resisted his spell-bolts, the gauntleted fists that swatted him to the stairs at every turn.  He was neither a disciplined fighter nor a well-controlled mage, and though he could grasp power from the air in an instant, every blow broke his grip; it spilled from his fingers faster than he could strike, and Orrith had reach, armaments, malice behind his eyes as he struck with the flat of the blade or the back of his hand.  No wards—he was careless like that, always forgetting until it was too late—and few protective enchantments on his robe and bracers, certainly not enough to stop the sword if Orrith turned the edge on him.

But he would not yield.  One touch was all it took.  One touch on bare flesh and he could burn Orrith from the inside out.

"Stop it!  Stop it!" he heard his wife shout from below, drawing closer, but he ignored her.  It felt strange to.  He had spent so long struggling to listen, to understand what she lectured him about—rules, morals, ridiculous things—that he had learned to obey.  To anticipate what she would and would not object to, behaviorally, and stay on her good side.

He loved her.  He wanted her to be happy with him.

But even that would not stop him now.

One touch.  One opening.  Ignore the blows, ignore the fracturing bone.  Not the worst he’d been through.  Ignore the words, all the shouts and screams.  Only the magic mattered: the ultimate pulse growing inside him, stronger by far than the sparks he handled externally, building, building into one uninterruptible charge.  A strike so powerful it could even kill a Silver One.

So close.  So close.  Then—

—silver braid—

The world washed out into nothing.  As the mage's essence heaved within him, Cob staggered, hardly knowing where he was anymore, only that all was rushing white fire and sickening fear.

Then the stairs came into focus, and the Muriae woman lay crumpled there, face down, her own blurry sword fallen from her hand.

He looked from the blackened hole at the back of her leather jerkin to the stricken face of her brother.  It seemed an eternity before Orrith’s expression changed, each line crawling across his features for millennia, drawing hate deep as canyons.  The sword moved up like the slow sweep of the silver moon, and there was no sound in the world—not a breath, not a heartbeat.

All the world was dead.

When the fire came, he felt nothing.  It spread away from him in a catastrophic ring, and though his mouth was open, he was not screaming.  He would have heard it if he was screaming.  He saw his brother-in-law go down in the blast, saw Trifolders reeling away from the steps, their tabards combusting; saw the grass catch, then the window-shutters.  And the fire kept flooding out, pouring down the steps to scorch the stone and crack the pavings, and they were running—friends, foes, hapless animals.  Scraps of color in the gale.

Something white flickered in the burning doorway.

Recognition punched him in the chest, and like a sleepwalker he turned, unable to look down at the sprawled figure, unable to look back.  Fire still fell from his spasming fingers; it raced ahead of him as he crossed the threshold, igniting the rugs, crawling up the tapestries and skipping over the floor tiles, but even then he could not feel urgency.  Only numbness, and some faint knowledge that he had to find—

Mariss.

At the name, the dream-state snapped.  Sound roared in again, full of sizzle and hiss and crack.  He took a breath, tasted burning meat.  The manor beckoned.

She was here somewhere.  His daughter.

Smoke boiled up from the furnishings as he kicked down doors and screamed her name into darkened chambers, blind to the fire that followed him.  The servants who had cowered from the knights before now cowered from him, but he ignored them, racing from room to room, corridor to corridor, through the grand hall where he and his companions had gathered before the hunt to play cards and nap on the padded divans and drink.  Bottles exploded behind the polished bar as he passed, incandescent.

Flames crawled up the stairway banisters, up to the balcony, and he saw that flash of white move into a corridor on the second floor.  Away, away.

He could not let her go.  First child, most perfect creation, all he had ever wanted.  Better than he deserved.  Up the collapsing stairs he ran, a cloak of fire in his wake, heedless, the paintings roasting from the walls as he passed.  Everything he had gathered here, washed away by his mistakes.

Into the corridor.  To the corner.

Then he stopped in his tracks.

The passageway narrowed here in a way that it should not.  Barely a yard down the hall, the white floor-tiles became fibrous as if invaded by rhizomes or fungal roots, and within a few more feet their filaments had consumed the floor and spread to the dark wainscoting.  They were slender like cobwebs at first but soon thickened until they had coated and utterly consumed the walls.  At its end, the hall was a silk-shrouded tunnel, tiny filaments dangling from the whitened ceiling to drift faintly in an unfelt wind.

For the first time, the mage balked.  Even Cob's stomach tightened as he thudded back to reality, reminded of his flying dream with the white filaments relentlessly chasing him.  The faint suggestion of another staircase rose from the cocooned end of the hall, white-on-white making it hard to see.  Neither of them wanted to approach it.

But it’s just a nightmare
, Cob thought, grasping at that realization like a lifeline.  His hands were his own again, and the fire at his back was just an echo, a memory, a ghost.  The taste in his mouth was bitter, but not from smoke or ash: from bile.  He felt sick, uncertain, afraid—but himself.

We’ve come this far
, he decided, and Enkhaelen reluctantly concurred.

They left the unmarred corridor behind, moving cautiously, but the only stir of the tendrils was in the breeze of their passing.  Halfway down the hall, they looked back, expecting the cocoon to have closed in on them, but the corner was still clear.  The smoke and fire had gone.

The spiral staircase at the end of the hall was thick with webbing.  Above, Enkhaelen knew, would be one of the garrets below the gabled roof.  An unseen window cast light down upon the whitened steps.

There was no more point in hesitating.  They were in the teeth of the trap and might as well press through to its heart.

Up they went.

The spiral was tight, forcing Cob to let one arm scrape the webbing to keep the other clear.  After a few turns, he passed the window, but the view was obscured by fibers; a few more turns and the webby ceiling grew too close for him to stand straight.  The stairs continued right up to the webs, and he prodded ahead with a grimace until he felt some give.  A trapdoor.  Pushing with his shoulder, he managed to wedge it up despite the filaments determined to keep it shut; a good forceful heave and they shredded into tiny particles, the trapdoor flying open to bang against the unseen floor.

He peeked up into the new room, and at first saw only webbing arrayed in uncomfortably organic hummocks.  It took a moment for Enkhaelen to remember the things beneath them: furniture, shelves, the accoutrements of his little office, all the sharp edges made soft by the thick strands.  Clearer were the windows that lit the garret room, arranged on the low side like a row of portholes.  The webbed ceiling angled down tightly just above them.

There was nothing else.  No firebird, no white-garbed child.  His heart sank, but he glimpsed movement through the windows so reluctantly moved to look.

At first, he could just see the tops of the hedges and the trees beyond, so he shimmied closer until the edge of the yard came into view.  And there they were: a silver-haired man and a dark-haired child on a horse, picking their way through the flame-scoured garden toward the hedge exit.

Something chuckled deeper in the room, and Cob sprang up, feeling himself tear away from the symbiotic sensation of the mage.  His scalp and one shoulder scraped along the low ceiling, shredding threads all over him, and for a moment he tore at them in panic as he stumbled into the clearer space.

The laughter echoed louder, coming from the far end of the room, but nothing else happened.  The threads hung limp, lifeless, and Cob cursed under his breath as he picked them from his hair, trying to get his nerves under control.  Being ridden by the necromancer's nightmare had shaken him deeply, and when he looked to the windows he could almost believe he saw the man crouched there, staring into the burning yard toward something he felt suspiciously certain was a hallucination, if not an outright trick.

But there was no one at the window, and the place where he had scraped the filaments from was already regrowing them, covering the charred wood.  He turned toward the laughter, forcing himself to be calm.

"Enkhaelen?" he called out, glad his voice did not tremble.

The figure at the far end of the garret did not answer.  It did not need to.

Six wings spread from its shoulders, the highest pair splayed like those of a soaring eagle, the middle the full and heavy wings of an owl, and the last skeletal, protruding from the creature’s lower back like madly extended ribs—all as stark white as the creature’s flesh.  It perched on a webbed hummock with talons instead of feet, its crouch concealing much of its body, but scales covered it from talon to knee and its arms were sinewy-thin, the right hand tapering to bare bone.  Its features were human despite the bleached mien and the occasional feather in the long, unruly hair: a sharp-featured individual, only recognizably male because Cob had seen it before.

In the cave-mouth of his flying dream, grinning beneath the bird-skull helm as it prepared to kill his father.

“Ravager,” he said, clenching his fists.

Though the monster’s pose and wide-spread wings bespoke threat, it did not leap at him as expected.  Instead, it waved its bony hand in a downward gesture like mollification.  “We have not brought you here to fight,” it said, its husky rasp holding nothing of Enkhaelen.

The webs shivered, and suddenly Lerien stood beside it, hands behind his back, head bowed like a page awaiting orders from his lord.  Though Cob was aware of their connection, the sight made his heart twinge.

“
Why bring me here?” he demanded of the monster.  “Why show me this...this...?”

The Ravager perched its chin in its skeletal palm and regarded him through colorless eyes.  “This vision was not of our choosing,” it said calmly.  “We endured it only to keep you safe."

"Pike 'safe'.  What happened here?  The Brancirans?  And his kid...  Enkhaelen had a kid?"

“
That is not your concern.  We need to talk."

"Then talk."  Right now, Cob wanted nothing more than to beat the nasty creature's skull in, but nothing around him looked like a good weapon and he was vaguely aware that some of his anger was Enkhaelen's, the residue of that traumatic dream.  He tried to push it down, horrified that he could have felt kinship with that man even for a moment, even while walking in his skin.  There was nothing to pity about him.

The Ravager bobbed its head in a birdlike manner and said, "There are things we can not tell you, even now.  But we know what Enkhaelen plans, and we know what we want."  It leaned forward, long-fingered hands dangling over the scaled knobs of its knees, and showed its back-hooked teeth in a freakish smile.  "We want him dead."

Cob blinked, completely taken aback.  He looked to the spot by the windows again, still empty.  "But...you're him and he's you."

"Untrue," said the Ravager.  "We are not your enemy."

"That's what he keeps sayin'.  Were you the voice in his head?"

It looked confused, then said, "No.  Do not be taken in by sympathy, nor think that we are like him.  He is a liar.  He is the enemy of all things.  We are hunger, yes, and depredation.  We are murder, cannibalism, infanticide, retaliation and tyranny, revolution and rage.  But we are not a destroyer, no matter what they say.  We cull the weak to preserve the strong; we force the stagnant to change or die.  We drive the lazy herds from their feeding grounds before they can strip the land barren, and eat them so that they do not starve.  We preserve the world for the future by limiting the present, and though all hate us for it, we do not turn to Outsiders to create our revenge.”